Vivid Visegrád

   

Visegrad is a small medieval town about 45 minutes by train north of Budapest, where we went to see a 13th century citadel high on a hilltop dominating a bend in the Danube. After an hour hiking up the steep hill by the village, we emerged from the woods to a parking lot with a tour bus and souvenir stands before the final climb to the citadel ruins. Circling the base of the rock on which the citadel was built, we passed a children's archery range, a horse waiting to give a ride around a small pen, and a plywood throne available for your portrait as a king or queen. A little further on the trees opened up to a spectacular view of the Danube Bend, a region of small towns and tall hills where the river makes a turn, flowing south through Hungary.

Inside the largely in-tact ruin, armor and weapons displays and food and hunting dioramas gave a sense of life under constant pressure from rival kingdoms and the riches at stake in the centuries of wars fought here. We paid a little extra to see the wax figures, and for that we saw an overflowing feast that looked a little stale, and a scene of music and dancing that looked strangely un-merry. It was a little disappointing when the medieval torture displays I'd read about were no longer around. Perhaps recent events in the world have made it no fun anymore.

It was all nicely vivid despite the laughs. Maybe because, having grown up in the New World where I'm used to the Middle Ages being reproduced more cartoonishly, the campy displays here within such a genuine and dramatic setting succeeded in making palpable what the citadel might've really been like once upon a time. 

       

Ferry to Visegrád

     
Sometimes crossing a bridge is a big event and sometimes it's barely noticeable. For everyone else on it, this ferry crossing seemed barely noticeable. It was just how you get from the train in Nagymaros across the Danube to Visegrad. To me that normalcy made it a bit of an event, I guess. What's the threshold from ferry to bridge, anyway?

Scrabble-tile signs of Budapest

Another in a series of small things seen regularly around Budapest which I gradually realize contributes to the look of the place: these Scrabble-tile signs. 

Stumbling on pálinka

Walking along the Dunakorzo (the Danube river bank south of the Szechenyi bridge) on our way to Buda last weekend we happened upon the Palinka Promenad, a three-day celebration/promotion of the fruit brandy made in Hungary. It's an industry that seems to be building itself from moonshine into a respectable spirit, refining the laws that define rules of production. 

So, what the hell, when in Rome, right?  Palinka's more traditionally made from plums (szilva), apricots (barack), or cherries (cseresznye), but we tried some made from chestnuts and from quince. [Chestnut=dry and quince=floral.] The afternoon floated by a bit after that.

Turkish leftovers

I stumbled across the 430+ year-old Kiraly furdo (baths) tucked in behind some trees off of Fo utca in Buda the other day. The Ottoman Empire ruled these parts for roughly a century and a half, naturally leaving a permanent imprint on Hungarian culture and adding a significant layer in what makes Budapest. The copper domes and heavy stonework were identical to Turkish baths we'd seen in Istanbul.

Clark Adam ter

Clark Adam ter, on the Buda side of the Szechenyi lanchid (Chain Bridge), was once planted with flowers to form the shape of a red star. Of course that's changed now. Symbols like that are outlawed (though that's being challenged in court).  Still, the imagination has an easy time here. Like sitting in front of a fireplace, it's easy to stare at for a while...

Wilderness river

Walking tonight across the Margit hid (a bridge between Buda and Pest with an angle in the middle where it meets the tip of Margit Island), we noticed someone had a campfire going on the bank of the island. The island is almost completely dark at night. A campfire, steeped in its ancient sense of home, safety and civilization surrounded by wilderness, here tonight looked every bit the refuge for someone down there against the surrounding darkness, and the city sparkling just across the water.

Car-free on Andrássy út

   
Last Sunday was European Car-Free Day, in which several major boulevards in Budapest were closed to their normally hasty and impersonal types of traffic and opened instead to the slower, messier, and liberating foot traffic more favorable to civic interaction. (While street fairs and festivals are of course not unique to this city, my impression of life here is nevertheless shaped by the fairly frequent events like this one.)

We jostled through the crowds past blocks of booths for theater groups, environmental advocacy groups, art displays and stages. One stage had a cricket player batting bread rolls into the audience, which was showering them back at him en masse. Another stage too far to see had its audience laughing in sudden bursts. 

Knowing little of the language written and spoken around you can lead to a state of bewildering magic, as when at one point we were followed by a group of meters(???). I later caught one of them captivated by a group of break-dancers that had drawn a crowd.

  

The lights of the city

Some things take repeated sightings built up over time to recognize them as traits of a place. One of them for me in Budapest has been the look of neon signs and how they are used.

The fall riot season

It seems there were some minor upheavals here in Budapest last Saturday. We were in much of the day to catch up on some work, when it became noticeable that the helicopter high up over our neighborhood wasn't going anywhere. I can't say how long it was there, maybe an hour or so drifting around mainly overhead. Meanwhile more and more sirens were darting around. Because ours and most of the buildings around here are 5-7 stories there isn't a lot of visibility. It was a time one would normally turn on the news for any breaking stories. We don't have the cable hooked up, so no TV for us and English radio is very intermittent. I recalled a story I'd read in the paper a few days earlier about the mayor of District V being concerned about possible clashes coming from opposing marches planned for Saturday.

Over the next hour or so I was able to find several breaking stories posted on news websites, first in Hungarian (in which I loosely translated the ones accompanying photos of police in riot gear and other turmoil), then in English, all of which were confirming the opposing march violence theory. Finally by around 8PM the police sirens had died down and this all clear was posted on Pesticide, an informal English language Budapest website. 

The extremely brief version of the scoop is that there are some extremist 

right-wing groups (Hungary for the Hungarians, down with the WWII treaties which gave up a lot of the old homeland to surrounding countries, down with immigrants, down with the Roma, etc.) here in Hungary that have been increasingly vocalizing themselves over the past couple of years, against which some leftist organizations are starting to reformulate themselves. They are organizing to oppose the discrimination and racism that they see as a growing threat to national unity. Well, Saturday they had simultaneous marches that finished very near each other, and our apartment. Apparently some clashes broke out between the police and the Right-wingers and things were thrown, violence escalated, tear gas was sprayed and fire hoses were squirted before it all disipated.

We had a wonderful late dinner at a bar/restaurant called Dupla a few blocks away that night.